Photo by Mark Rosasco A family sits on the steps of their home in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in an area prone to flooding during the rainy season. ( Mark Rosasco )
Photo by Mark Rosasco A young Cambodian girl stands in front of her home in Borey Keila, an urban slum district of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. ( Mark Rosasco )
By LJ Anderson
Daily News Columnist
Posted: 07/06/2010
When Mark and Barbara Rosasco embarked on a career change that involved promoting handmade traditional products from Southeast Asia, they made sure that a part of their business plan included giving back to the countries from which they hoped to profit. Having lived in Asia since 1990, they knew that the level of poverty and — at that time, in 1997 — the effects of the AIDS epidemic, were simply too great to ignore.
The focus of their philanthropic efforts has been in Cambodia, where 40 percent of the people live at or below the poverty line, and many have been forcibly evicted from their homes. The country has experienced the effects of civil war, government corruption, a decimated public health system, and although there have been improvements, among the highest HIV prevalence rates in Southeast Asia.
Mark and Barbara Rosasco, of Menlo Park, founded the Kasumisou Foundation (www.kasumisou-foundation.info) in 1998, a family foundation that provides support services to more than 70 Cambodian families, assisting with food, housing, school expenses, and visits from a home-care team.
Q: How did you become familiar with medical needs in Cambodia?
A: Our frequent business trips there gave us a better understanding of local problems. When we started our business and the foundation in the late 1990s, Cambodia had few resources to treat AIDS, and so HIV/AIDS was a death sentence.
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The stigma was immense, with people sometimes driven from their homes by violence. Husbands infected wives and then threw them and their children out into the street, if the wife showed symptoms. As a result of their civil war in the 1970s, Cambodia was devastated socially and economically, and had few state resources to assist such families.
Q: What have you learned about the challenges of treating AIDS patients in Cambodia?
A: The idea for our support program came about during a 1999 visit to Phnom Penh. Mark learned of a homeless couple with a 2-year-old son and infant daughter who lived by the garbage heap at a Buddhist temple, and that first family opened our eyes. We decided to focus on the sickest and poorest, mainly homeless mothers with end-stage AIDS, and their kids. At that time, there were few fully functioning hospitals in Phnom Penh. AIDS patients were often critically ill before they ever saw a doctor, and frequently found their way to various hospitals or Catholic hospices to die. After basic treatment, some patients recovered enough to be discharged, but all too often they had no homes to return to.
In the early years of our support program, medication for a single AIDS patient cost from $5,000-$10,000 per year — prohibitive costs for a small foundation like ours — and we lost about 30-40 percent of our "patient moms" each year.
Q: What type of formalized care is available to them now, such as clinics?
A: Before widespread access to antiretroviral medications (ARV), we routinely found homeless AIDS patients dying on the sidewalks and back alleys of Phnom Penh. But over the past 10 years, the so-called "AIDS cocktail" has been provided to the Cambodian Ministry of Health by the UN's Global Fund, and this has dramatically reduced the mortality rate, and improved immunity levels and quality of life for those who carry the virus.
Today there are also several hospitals in Phnom Penh, and a network of government clinics offering ARV therapy and treatment for opportunistic infections. But patients must still pay for their own basic medicines, and for the most destitute, the cost of transportation to hospitals or clinics can put life-saving drug therapy beyond their reach.
We give indigent mothers a stable living situation and social oversight so they can get to medical appointments, take their medication properly, and have food for their families. The good news is that patients are living longer, so there are fewer newly orphaned children. But these families are usually headed by a single mother with AIDS who has few employment options, so we continue social support in order to safeguard their children. We work hard to keep kids in school, and teach them to take pride in Cambodia's rich artistic heritage. Our task is also challenging because many of our mothers are illiterate and do not fully understand the importance of education. But without education, their kids will become young adults who are confronted with situations of abuse or exploitation, and a cycle of inherited poverty. With education, these children can face a world of possibilities.
Q: How have you personally changed since becoming involved in this area of the world?
A: It has changed our perspective on what is important in life, and we have become remarkably efficient when it comes to stretching a dollar. We also realize that it is impossible to "save the world." But, as individuals, we can be a strong force for positive change for a small group of people. For example, we see the impact our program has made on the children, and families have been kept intact, keeping kids with moms. Over the years countless children would have surely died, suffered abuse, or been trafficked without the safety and structure of our programs. All of the children have benefited from increased education, and we now have two orphaned kids who started college during the past year. Faith, family, and knowledge of making a real difference in the world are the things that really count in life.
LJ Anderson writes on health matters every other Wednesday. She can be reached at lj.anderson@yahoo.com or at www.ljanderson.com.
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